Zelfportret 1995 nr. 49 1995

Philip Akkerman’s ‘Self Portrait 1995 no. 49’ is a head seen in profile, made with pencil on paper. I love the obsessive mark making here, the sheer accumulation of lines to describe the contours of his own face. Imagine Akkerman in his studio, day after day, year after year, returning to the same subject: himself! He looks at his face, draws a line, then another, and another. There’s a kind of compulsive repetition, a self-imposed constraint, but within that, there’s also endless variation. I can imagine him thinking about his predecessors – the Northern Renaissance painters, maybe, with their intense focus on detail and the human form. This drawing is almost sculptural, with each line building up form like layers of clay. The lines are raw and direct, but somehow, all those small marks create a kind of presence. It reminds me that the act of looking and drawing is itself a way of knowing.